Chelsea at the Edge of the End

Who likes Chelsea? Help me figure this out. The club sociology that I am able to collect from the internet basically tells a story of how the cast of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” accidentally kissed the Beatles one magical night under a rainbow of Richard Avedon portraits, until caring too much about who Julie Christie was made them bitter and furious, so that before long they were wearing muttonchops and starting knife fights with pushcart vendors while a grainy montage of Margaret Thatcher footage played over and over again on the wall of the office building where Roman Abramovich would one day drink the entire contents of a camping thermos full of six hundred million dollars. Streams trickling from the corners of his mouth as he chuckled outrageously, he would then mentally command Vivienne Westwood to explode in a Virgin Megastore elevator somewhere off the Kings’s Road. And yet the Champions League would still be denied him.

I am wondering who loves a club at which the fans chant “you don’t know what you’re doing” to the manager as he makes the substitutions that are about to win them the game. The worst part of that incident from the Arsenal match last weekend is that Avram Grant never appears more uncomfortable and out of his depth than when he is confronted with evidence that extremely loud morons find him uncomfortable and out of his depth. It must have been an excruciating form of revenge for him to see Anelka flick the ball on to Drogba for the winning goal, proving him terribly right as he stood there looking more and more terribly wrong. Avram Grant must have felt embarrassed to have appeared to need a gaudy win to show up the crowd where a spell of concentrated glowering couldn’t. It’s hard when you’re subtle, man. So much of the time you’d rather just not make the point.

There’s just a lot of unexplained dourness around Chelsea right now. It’s odd. They have more money than the fat kid from Leave It to Beaver (fact: the person with the fewest money worries in the history of the world), a richly talented group of players, enough trophies to form a Voltron-like super-trophy with which to explore outer space, and an outside chance of winning both the Premier League and the Champions League in the next two months. And yet the fans don’t trust the manager, the executives don’t trust the fans, and the players either don’t trust each other or just came home from the Congress of Vienna. A diagram tracing all the lines of resentment and angles of dislike running through the changing room right now would look eerily like Rinus Michels’s early plans for Total Football.

They have a relatively easy schedule ahead—they’re five points behind Manchester United, but still get to play them at Stamford Bridge, where they haven’t lost since about 1066, so they could conceivably win the league by making up just three points in six matches. Their littlest ballboy has 62 caps for Iceland. Why are they being screamed at by snub racists with vile pubescent shoes? It ought to be luxury and high times for Chelsea, and instead you feel like their favorite chair is broken and the radiator clang from upstairs is gradually making them murderous.

Speaking about resentment and politics, you cannot miss out the twin terrors, Lampard and Terry, who are virtually deciding the fate of any incoming manager and players who deviated from their point of views.

And the unsettled Drogba, with annoying regularity, whines about moving on to a better club.

“Who likes Chelsea?” The players have little love for the club, they owe their allegiance only to money or their former boss, Mourinho… not to the well-being of the club.

Ah. The problem being, Brian, that our manager is so subtle, we morons regularly confuse this as cluelessness. Whether the substitutions that won us the Arsenal game were products of his sublimely subtle genius, or a moment of sheer outrageousness that actually worked, or whether Arsenal has lost all will to play is a mystery to me. We did lose the Fenerbahce match, where our manager spent his time looking more and more lost with each passing moment.

There are more points to be made. One, I hate the neo-realist movement with all my heart. Yet, greatness and misery go hand in hand. Also, I think the aesthetic sensibilities of the average football fan is still Pre-raphaelite (Arsenal), and most have not ascended to Cubism and Picasso (Chelsea).

As for love of the team, Ten Cats and Uncle Fester have managed to rupture any feeling of brotherhood in the team. During Mourinho’s era, the team functioned as a slick well-oiled machine, not pretty perhaps to the more lush and sensitive souls, but certainly endearing to someone as bourgeois as me who likes silverware instead of never fulfilled promises and history. We do not make a song and cry about a club 103 years old.

As for Lampard and Terry, given that they are the most succesful and certainly two of the longest serving players of the club, should not their views count for something? If, as JohnSt says, their views regard managers and players really held that much power, Mourinho wouldn’t have left, Frank’s contract would have been renewed by now, and Shevchenko wouldn’t have been in the club.

Last, but not the least, that great seducer of hearts and corruptor of morals, the Prince of light and lies, the man who induces greatest heart-ache and hangover in his players and supporters alike, Jose Mourinho. Few people ever recover from contact with him, either good or bad. His loss is mourned by personalities with interests, characters and positions re:Chelsea as diverse as Sir Alex, Arsene and Richard Attenborough. He may have been a bastard, but he was ours. He gave the club their greatest victories, numerous silverware, and made a band of brothers ( a la Spartaaaaaaaaaaa) of his players, the slow disintegration of which is painful to see and believe. Avram lacks the je ne sais quoi to dislodge him from our hearts. We (supporters, players, commentators, other managers, ex-players of Mourinho) are still mourning him, and Avram is feeling the wrath of our combined broken hearts .

Yet, I can assure you, love for this utterly strange club reigns supreme, and grows greater every time I hear a disparaging remark, (suspiciously, almost always from the lovers of those two teams directly beneath us in the league table).

Also, re:Avram and “gaudy wins”. That was his promise to the supporters instead of Mourinho’s “stodgy” game. Is it wrong for us to demand this? And considering the form ManU is in, I won’t be suprised (cross my fingers though), if the other Mourinho era record of the unbeaten run at the Bridge ends.

We weep, because this seems like the last glorious incandescence before burning out. Gong out in a blaze of glory.

Mou, thanks for this brilliant comment—exactly the sort of insight I had hoped for when I asked who still loved Chelsea. I think everyone misses Mourinho, even the people who hate him; witness the popularity of those not-really-all-that-funny puppet skits on Setanta. They seem to be mocking him, but deep down they’re kind of clapping their hands and saying, “What a character!”

Still can’t look at it as a great move for the fans to chant his name at Stamford Bridge, though—seems too much like an expression of resentment toward Abramovich, which looks a bit spoiled from the outside given everything his money has done for the club.

Personally, I’m still undecided about Grant. I thought he was a ridiculous choice for the club given his anonymity and inexperience, but he really hasn’t done all that badly (remember when we all thought he’d be forced to play Shevchenko in every match?) and I think gets worse treatment than he deserves because he’s so clearly the opposite of Mourinho when it comes to media presence—he really does look clueless on TV. Whether that means he’s actually clueless, I don’t know; I sort of doubt we’ll have time to find out.